Unveiling Provider Bias in Large Language Models for Code Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as the new recommendation engines, outperforming traditional methods in both capability and scope, particularly in code generation applications. Our research reveals a novel provider bias in LLMs, namely without explicit input prompts, these models show systematic preferences for services from specific providers in their recommendations (e.g., favoring Google Cloud over Microsoft Azure). This bias holds significant implications for market dynamics and societal equilibrium, potentially promoting digital monopolies. It may also deceive users and violate their expectations, leading to various consequences. This paper presents the first comprehensive empirical study of provider bias in LLM code generation. We develop a systematic methodology encompassing an automated pipeline for dataset generation, incorporating 6 distinct coding task categories and 30 real-world application scenarios. Our analysis encompasses over 600,000 LLM-generated responses across seven state-of-the-art models, utilizing approximately 500 million tokens (equivalent to \$5,000+ in computational costs). The study evaluates both the generated code snippets and their embedded service provider selections to quantify provider bias. Additionally, we conduct a comparative analysis of seven debiasing prompting techniques to assess their efficacy in mitigating these biases. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs exhibit significant provider preferences, predominantly favoring services from Google and Amazon, and can autonomously modify input code to incorporate their preferred providers without users' requests. Notably, we observe discrepancies between providers recommended in conversational contexts versus those implemented in generated code. The complete dataset and analysis results are available in our repository.

CALM: Curiosity-Driven Auditing for Large Language Models

Auditing Large Language Models (LLMs) is a crucial and challenging task. In this study, we focus on auditing black-box LLMs without access to their parameters, only to the provided service. We treat this type of auditing as a black-box optimization problem where the goal is to automatically uncover input-output pairs of the target LLMs that exhibit illegal, immoral, or unsafe behaviors. For instance, we may seek a non-toxic input that the target LLM responds to with a toxic output or an input that induces the hallucinative response from the target LLM containing politically sensitive individuals. This black-box optimization is challenging due to the scarcity of feasible points, the discrete nature of the prompt space, and the large search space. To address these challenges, we propose Curiosity-Driven Auditing for Large Language Models (CALM), which uses intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning to finetune an LLM as the auditor agent to uncover potential harmful and biased input-output pairs of the target LLM. CALM successfully identifies derogatory completions involving celebrities and uncovers inputs that elicit specific names under the black-box setting. This work offers a promising direction for auditing black-box LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/x-zheng16/CALM.git.

Improving Integrated Gradient-based Transferable Adversarial Examples by Refining the Integration Path

Transferable adversarial examples are known to cause threats in practical, black-box attack scenarios. A notable approach to improving transferability is using integrated gradients (IG), originally developed for model interpretability. In this paper, we find that existing IG-based attacks have limited transferability due to their naive adoption of IG in model interpretability. To address this limitation, we focus on the IG integration path and refine it in three aspects: multiplicity, monotonicity, and diversity, supported by theoretical analyses. We propose the Multiple Monotonic Diversified Integrated Gradients (MuMoDIG) attack, which can generate highly transferable adversarial examples on different CNN and ViT models and defenses. Experiments validate that MuMoDIG outperforms the latest IG-based attack by up to 37.3\% and other state-of-the-art attacks by 8.4\%. In general, our study reveals that migrating established techniques to improve transferability may require non-trivial efforts. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/RYC-98/MuMoDIG}.

Nullu: Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models via HalluSpace Projection

Recent studies have shown that large vision-language models (LVLMs) often suffer from the issue of object hallucinations (OH). To mitigate this issue, we introduce an efficient method that edits the model weights based on an unsafe subspace, which we call HalluSpace in this paper. With truthful and hallucinated text prompts accompanying the visual content as inputs, the HalluSpace can be identified by extracting the hallucinated embedding features and removing the truthful representations in LVLMs. By orthogonalizing the model weights, input features will be projected into the Null space of the HalluSpace to reduce OH, based on which we name our method Nullu. We reveal that HalluSpaces generally contain statistical bias and unimodal priors of the large language models (LLMs) applied to build LVLMs, which have been shown as essential causes of OH in previous studies. Therefore, null space projection suppresses the LLMs' priors to filter out the hallucinated features, resulting in contextually accurate outputs. Experiments show that our method can effectively mitigate OH across different LVLM families without extra inference costs and also show strong performance in general LVLM benchmarks. Code is released at \url{https://github.com/Ziwei-Zheng/Nullu}.

Speech-Forensics: Towards Comprehensive Synthetic Speech Dataset Establishment and Analysis

Detecting synthetic from real speech is increasingly crucial due to the risks of misinformation and identity impersonation. While various datasets for synthetic speech analysis have been developed, they often focus on specific areas, limiting their utility for comprehensive research. To fill this gap, we propose the Speech-Forensics dataset by extensively covering authentic, synthetic, and partially forged speech samples that include multiple segments synthesized by different high-quality algorithms. Moreover, we propose a TEmporal Speech LocalizaTion network, called TEST, aiming at simultaneously performing authenticity detection, multiple fake segments localization, and synthesis algorithms recognition, without any complex post-processing. TEST effectively integrates LSTM and Transformer to extract more powerful temporal speech representations and utilizes dense prediction on multi-scale pyramid features to estimate the synthetic spans. Our model achieves an average mAP of 83.55% and an EER of 5.25% at the utterance level. At the segment level, it attains an EER of 1.07% and a 92.19% F1 score. These results highlight the model's robust capability for a comprehensive analysis of synthetic speech, offering a promising avenue for future research and practical applications in this field.

Can Targeted Clean-Label Poisoning Attacks Generalize?

Targeted poisoning attacks aim to compromise the model's prediction on specific target samples. In a common clean-label setting, they are achieved by slightly perturbing a subset of training samples given access to those specific targets. Despite continuous efforts, it remains unexplored whether such attacks can generalize to unknown variations of those targets. In this paper, we take the first step to systematically study this generalization problem. Observing that the widely adopted, cosine similarity-based attack exhibits limited generalizability, we propose a well-generalizable attack that leverages both the direction and magnitude of model gradients. In particular, we explore diverse target variations, such as an object with varied viewpoints and an animal species with distinct appearances. Extensive experiments across various generalization scenarios demonstrate that our method consistently achieves the best attack effectiveness. For example, our method outperforms the cosine similarity-based attack by 20.95% in attack success rate with similar overall accuracy, averaged over four models on two image benchmark datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/jiaangk/generalizable_tcpa

In-situ Self-optimization of Quantum Dot Emission for Lasers by Machine-Learning Assisted Epitaxy

Traditional methods for optimizing light source emissions rely on a time-consuming trial-and-error approach. While in-situ optimization of light source gain media emission during growth is ideal, it has yet to be realized. In this work, we integrate in-situ reflection high-energy electron diffraction (RHEED) with machine learning (ML) to correlate the surface reconstruction with the photoluminescence (PL) of InAs/GaAs quantum dots (QDs), which serve as the active region of lasers. A lightweight ResNet-GLAM model is employed for the real-time processing of RHEED data as input, enabling effective identification of optical performance. This approach guides the dynamic optimization of growth parameters, allowing real-time feedback control to adjust the QDs emission for lasers. We successfully optimized InAs QDs on GaAs substrates, with a 3.2-fold increase in PL intensity and a reduction in full width at half maximum (FWHM) from 36.69 meV to 28.17 meV under initially suboptimal growth conditions. Our automated, in-situ self-optimized lasers with 5-layer InAs QDs achieved electrically pumped continuous-wave operation at 1240 nm with a low threshold current of 150 A/cm2 at room temperature, an excellent performance comparable to samples grown through traditional manual multi-parameter optimization methods. These results mark a significant step toward intelligent, low-cost, and reproductive light emitters production.

Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning in LLMs by Stepwise Correction

Best-of-N decoding methods instruct large language models (LLMs) to generate multiple solutions, score each using a scoring function, and select the highest scored as the final answer to mathematical reasoning problems. However, this repeated independent process often leads to the same mistakes, making the selected solution still incorrect. We propose a novel prompting method named Stepwise Correction (StepCo) that helps LLMs identify and revise incorrect steps in their generated reasoning paths. It iterates verification and revision phases that employ a process-supervised verifier. The verify-then-revise process not only improves answer correctness but also reduces token consumption with fewer paths needed to generate. With StepCo, a series of LLMs demonstrate exceptional performance. Notably, using GPT-4o as the backend LLM, StepCo achieves an average accuracy of 94.1 across eight datasets, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art Best-of-N method by +2.4, while reducing token consumption by 77.8%.

Edge-guided inverse design of digital metamaterials for ultra-high-capacity on-chip multi-dimensional interconnect

The escalating demands of compute-intensive applications, including artificial intelligence, urgently necessitate the adoption of sophisticated optical on-chip interconnect technologies to overcome critical bottlenecks in scaling future computing systems. This transition requires leveraging the inherent parallelism of wavelength and mode dimensions of light, complemented by high-order modulation formats, to significantly enhance data throughput. Here we experimentally demonstrate a novel synergy of these three dimensions, achieving multi-tens-of-terabits-per-second on-chip interconnects using ultra-broadband, multi-mode digital metamaterials. Employing a highly efficient edge-guided analog-and-digital optimization method, we inversely design foundry-compatible, robust, and multi-port digital metamaterials with an 8xhigher computational efficiency. Using a packaged five-mode multiplexing chip, we demonstrate a single-wavelength interconnect capacity of 1.62 Tbit s-1 and a record-setting multi-dimensional interconnect capacity of 38.2 Tbit s-1 across 5 modes and 88 wavelength channels. A theoretical analysis suggests that further system optimization can enable on-chip interconnects to reach sub-petabit-per-second data transmission rates. This study highlights the transformative potential of optical interconnect technologies to surmount the constraints of electronic links, thus setting the stage for next-generation datacenter and optical compute interconnects.

Speculative Coreset Selection for Task-Specific Fine-tuning

Task-specific fine-tuning is essential for the deployment of large language models (LLMs), but it requires significant computational resources and time. Existing solutions have proposed coreset selection methods to improve data efficiency and reduce model training overhead, but they still have limitations: 1) Overlooking valuable samples at high pruning rates, which degrades the coreset's performance. 2) Requiring high time overhead during coreset selection to fine-tune and evaluate the target LLM. In this paper, we introduce STAFF, a speculative coreset selection method. STAFF leverages a small model from the same family as the target LLM to efficiently estimate data scores and then verifies the scores on the target LLM to accurately identify and allocate more selection budget to important regions while maintaining coverage of easy regions. We evaluate STAFF on three LLMs and three downstream tasks and show that STAFF improves the performance of SOTA methods by up to 54.3% and reduces selection overhead by up to 70.5% at different pruning rates. Furthermore, we observe that the coreset selected by STAFF at low pruning rates (i.e., 20%) can even obtain better fine-tuning performance than the full dataset.